Sunday, January 30, 2011

Bastinado

Last night my foot hurt. Let me restate this: last night, in bed, my right foot was extraordinarily painful. My first thought was diagnosis. The entire foot was very tender but nothing about the shape felt odd: no breakages, no swelling.

I reviewed the events of the evening. I had accompanied Clare to six o'clock Saturday Mass so she could watch Andy Murray in the Australian Open final Sunday morning. I must have stepped off a curb awkwardly coming back and not noticed at the time. But God, how it hurt this Saturday night!

My mind wandered to the Spanish practice of bastinado, the beating of prisoners' feet as a form of discreet torture, leaving no marks. I had reflected in the past that maybe this didn't sound so bad, but I was learning just how many nerve endings the foot actually has, all exquisitely tuned for pain.

When I was doing research into Artificial Intelligence in the 1980s, I had read Daniel Dennett on pain. He said that if you concentrated you could make the pain go away. Fine.

So I really thought about it and sensation gradually congealed as a red-hot wire through my foot. Dennet was right: as I focused my attention the pain transformed into mere data. But as he further observed, pain is ultimately so excruciatingly tedious that you can't stay focused forever.

I normally avoid pain-killers. Don't mask the pain, I say to myself, it's your body trying to tell you something. But all my body was communicating at that moment was that I wouldn't be getting any sleep tonight. I put the bedside lamp on - ten past one a.m. - and tried to stand. The pain was shocking and I couldn't put any weight on the foot. Nothing for it, I poked Clare: "You awake?"

She was now. Clare has a bedroom pharmacy of little white tablets: I pleaded for pain-killers. A few minutes later a barely conscious wife offered me two lozenge-shaped pills which I instantly swallowed. God knows what they were, maybe vitamin pills. Within half an hour I was away with the fairies.

This morning with only the slightest twinge I strolled to the paper shop, a twenty minute round trip. What is it with feet?

+++

My three samples were duly posted off to the NHS yesterday for checking. I expect to get a letter telling me whether I have colon cancer or not around February 14th. How romantic is that?